8x8
oil on canvas
In this painting I wanted to convey the dense fall treetops outside my studio window,
the muted, bluish trees on the horizon, and the particular gray of the sky that day. It
was a purplish haze, complementing the warm, mainly yellow middle ground. It is a quiet
little thing with bounce. Seurat worked with Pointillism in a very different way. First, he
didn't really paint complete circles but rather used short brush strokes. Secondly, he was
very aware of the edges between things. He defines form while also diffusing it, which
I do, but he has a much harder edge. The daylight paintings like A Sunday on the
Grande Jatte retain a softness because of the light quality and a rather tender manner
of applying the paint. His night paintings like The Side Show or the painting The Circus
tend to have harsh light and the paint application is different, more graphic, I think. My
work usually isn't so hard-edged, more concerned with paint handling than tight form.
Tenderness really comes through in his drawings, a quality perceived by art critic
Michael Kimmelman. At a lecture at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, I asked
him what art moves him the most and he said Seurat's drawings, the "why" we didn't get to.
The drawings have the feeling of a photograph, not at all in the amount of detailed
description but in the feeling of a moment in time, a concept true to the origins of
Impressionism. Their tonality and softness captures this to more of a degree than his work
in color. I think my September self-portrait depicting myself as shadow is similar in intent.
It is not always easy to discern the subtler qualities between oneself and others, not just in
art, but it is important in defining oneself. "She paints with dots" is about as informative
about what I do as "she is a basketball player" is to conveying who a person is. Trying to
convey what I do in words is so difficult that it takes weeks of circling around it
in this blog to come close. Sometimes I think I should just post the pictures.
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